If I could, through myself, set your spirit free
by CV3
Summary: On a hunt for a vengeful spirit in an old Iowa boarding house, the Winchesters cross paths with an eventuality of a hunt Dean worked alone while Sam was at Stanford. The title is from the U2 song "Bad." Some language.
1. Chapter 1 : The boarding house

_Jackson, Iowa, present day._

Dean Winchester checked the salt rounds in the sawed-off, ejected the clip from his habitual ivory-gripped .45, tapped it against the side of the receiver in a tick that always irritated Sam, shoved it home, racked the slide and pushed it into his waistband. Behind him, Sam's eyes wandered over the dilapidated building, the last vestige of a condemned old boarding house. Even from the distance of the fenced-off parking lot, the structure was clearly a hollowed shell, scheduled for demolition.

"You sure about this?" he asked.

Dean spared him a brief glance and a quirked eyebrow.

"What's not to be sure about? Vengeful spirit - simple, black and white case. Body cremated, victim murdered here by a house-mate back when the place was still in business. Building gets scheduled for demolition, spirit wakes up, equals string of dared, and now dead, teenage trespassers. It's the only explanation makes sense, Sammy. We roll in, find and destroy whatever remains are tying the spirit here, end of story."

"Yeah, I guess."

Dean straightened up, thumping the Impala's trunk shut with a little more force than necessary. "You guess?"

Sam's eyes skittered off the old boarding house to catch on his brother.

"No, sure you're probably right. Adds up. It's just …"

"What?" Dean heard the bite of irritation in his voice, but couldn't do much about it.

Sam shuffled from foot to foot, deliberating.

"It's just something about this seems … stretched. This place is in the middle of nowhere, well outside town by now. It's fenced up, there's occasional security, it's only been scheduled three weeks. And now suddenly a steady stream of kids decide to go sight-seeing and end up killed by one convenient vengeful spirit that just happens to be here? It just seems … too convenient."

Dean rolled his eyes.

"You're making too much of it, Sam. It's no big deal. Simple, straight up and down job. We get in there, finish off the spirit convenient or not, then we go for a drink and try to make some cash for a change, okay? Great."

He gave Sam an insincere smile and skirted his brother, hefting the shotgun and stalking towards the fence, not bothering to check if Sam was following. He was annoyed, he admitted, and that was never a great way to start a hunt, simple or not. But the "vibes" routine was vintage Sam - making a big deal out of nothing, complicating what was sure to be a clean-cut sweep and clear and making Dean second-guess himself. Everything was always twice as complicated as it needed to be with Sam, always had been. Right now, it pissed him off.

He shook his thoughts out of his head and focused on the job at hand. The fence was in bad repair, as the place had been cordoned off for several months, and despite the mobile security that occasionally made a token patrol since teenagers had been sneaking in and ending up dead, there were holes all along the fence. Easy access. Dean crouched down, gave the immediate area a cursory sweep, then shuffled quickly through the broken chain-link. The scuffling sounds behind him signalled Sam doing the same, but he didn't look back. He pushed the butt of the shotgun against his shoulder, barrel angled down, and looked around them. The west wall of the old building was about fifty meters from them over open ground that had once probably been a garden, but was now barren stone and parched grey refuse and dirt. The four storey building was completely dark, the light of the half moon washing it a stolid grey. Several of the windows on the bottom storeys were smashed, and a sign proclaiming the building condemned and private property, forbidding entry, was heavily graffitied.

He gave Sam a glance, who nodded silently. That was enough for Dean. He moved out from the fence, up a slight incline toward the building. Access wasn't difficult with the condition of the place, and Dean intended to simply walk in the front door, which he knew was on the south face of the building. He flattened himself against the west wall, the slide of Sam's shadow out of the moonlight signalling his brother following his lead. That fact marginally lessened his irritation at Sam and his tendency to argue and make something out of nothing, but he let it go for the moment. He braced the shotgun, still angling the barrel toward the dusty ground, and carefully made his way toward the front entrance, Sam at his back. Despite insisting that this was a simple job, piece of cake, which it still was, Dean was nonetheless sensible of the fact that the spirit had already killed four people, and despite the relative ease of dispensing a vengeful spirit with an obvious place of anchor, he was a hunter, and he was careful with his brother's life.

He stopped at the corner and craned his neck around to the south face. Everything was utterly still and silent. He tilted his head toward Sam and nodded, both Winchesters making their careful way up the sagging front steps of the building and each flagging a side of the main doors. A thick chain with a broken padlock hung uselessly off one handle, and the other stood a few inches ajar. Inside, everything was pitch black.

Dean cast his eyes over Sam, who was palming his flashlight with one hand and settling his own shotgun in the other. Dean knew Sam had a lighter and fluid on him, as did Dean, his Taurus with iron rounds and the shotgun with backup salt rounds. Dean slid his hand into his coat for the EMF as Sam pushed the door open silently and clicked on the flashlight. Dean followed him, casting his eyes around the old common area. A sagging reception desk swept along one wall, behind it empty mail pigeon-holes, in front of it a pile of fallen debris from a caved-in roof. The wreck of a pool table, several chairs and tables and a rotted couch were the only things in the room. The fireplace was littered with empty beer cans, bottles of Jack and old camp-fire logs under the beam of Sam's flashlight. Their steps were partially muffled by threadbare carpeting cordoned off in brass, old style.

At the end of the room, a narrow flight of stairs curled up behind the reception to the upper storeys. The EMF silent in Dean's hand and Sam's inspection of the common room done, Dean tapped the backs of his fingers against his brother's shoulder and indicated the stairs. Sam nodded briefly, eyes moving past Dean and up the stairs. Dean took the lead, shotgun raised slightly, tight against his shoulder.

The stairs opened out into the second storey, a hall stretching away in both directions, doors to the old rooms both open and closed. Dean turned back towards Sam and was about to suggest they split up and take one direction each, when his eyes caught on Sam's alert expression, his sudden stillness, looking away from Dean and down the hall to his left. It was then Dean heard it, too, and wondered with fresh irritation how he hadn't before. A soft scuffing, like heavy boots on old floorboards. Silence, then more scuffing. It was coming from the hall, where it bent around to the left, back towards the bathrooms. Sam turned back to Dean, his eyes glittering in the sparse light of the downcast flashlight. Dean gave a curt nod, stepping in front of his brother and raising the shotgun parallel to the floor. He heard Sam's hiss of annoyance, but ignored him, creeping silently toward the corner of the hall just as the scuffing of boots came closer. It could be more of the same teenage darers who made up their list of victims, but Dean doubted it with the distinct absence of the giggling of teenage girls or the voices of teenage boys egging each other on. As far as they knew, the mobile security company who monitored the place did so from outdoors, so it was unlikely to be a guard. The EMF was silent now in Dean's jacket pocket, so it was unlikely to be their ghost. To be honest he had no idea what it was - it was an unknown, which was why Sam was deliberately behind him, annoyed or not.

He stopped just before the corner, eyes on the floor, looking for any sign of light or movement. There was neither. The scuffing sound had stopped on the other side of the corner at the same time as his own steps had. He licked his lips, trusted Sam to swing the flashlight up as soon as he made his move, and swung himself around the corner, shotgun raised - and right into the startled, pale face of the man aiming a similar shotgun at his. Sam's flashlight from behind him caught the stranger in the eyes, and he hissed, squinting, but didn't drop the barrel.

"Put it down," Dean demanded. "What the hell are you doing in here?"

There was a beat of charged silence - the stranger's shotgun still aimed at Dean's face - before the man in front of him raised his arm up in front of his face to shield his eyes from Sam's flashlight and enquire "Dean?"

That was a curve-ball. Dean snugged the shotgun butt against his shoulder, fingers itching against the trigger.

"Who the hell are you?" he snapped.

At his demand, the man in front of him deflated, dropping the barrel of his shotgun towards the floor, his breath leaving him in a rush of relief as he braced his other hand against the wall on his right, shoulders sagging.

"Jesus, Dean, you scared the living shit out of me!"

"Answer the damn question, pal," Dean advised in a growl.

The pale face tilted back up to him, spikes of black hair splintering into flat grey eyes, and some spark of recognition did start to itch at the back of Dean's memory.

"Ellis, Danny Ellis, from Hartford, Wisconsin."


	2. Chapter 2 : The case of Danny Ellis

_Hartford, Wisconsin, three years previously._

Danny Ellis was sleeping. It was Saturday morning, and by the angle of the sun along the sill, it was before noon. Which did not explain why there was a persistent banging coming from down stairs that sounded impossibly like someone pounding on his door before noon on a Saturday. He pulled his head out of his pillows and squinted at the digital clock on the stereo. It read 9:36am. This was not happening. The pounding persisted. Danny reluctantly dragged himself out of bed and at least had the presence of mind at such an insane time on a Saturday to pull on a pair of sweat pants, feeling the now-familiar pull of the scar at the side of his chest, high up on the ribs. He ignored it, as he was becoming better at doing, and shuffled to the landing to glare at the door. The bubbled glass pane at the top revealed the misshapen silhouette of a head and shoulders. Someone at the door. Someone pounding on his door before noon on a Saturday. With a growl, Danny shuffled down the stairs and wrenched the door open.

"What?"

On his porch, a man in a dark suit stood regarding him.

"Daniel Ellis?" he asked crisply.

"Yeah," Danny replied, leaning on the door and squinting at the stranger.

"Agent Gillan, FBI," the man snapped an ID in his face too quickly for Danny to process. "I want to ask you some questions."

"It's before noon, and it's Saturday," Danny said, as though that should have explained everything to the stranger, FBI or not. Federal cops who worked before noon on Saturdays?

A slight frown greeted him at that.

"Apologies for the hour, then, but I need to ask you some questions about your late fiancé, Mavis Wells."

This was very quickly becoming less and less funny, in Danny's book. Some cop turns up on the doorstep _before noon on a Saturday _and then starts asking questions about Mave? Not good.

"There's nothing to tell," Danny snapped. "I've told everything to the cops a thousand times, it's all been investigated to the best of their abilities or so I've been told, it's unsolved and it's staying that way, nothing they can do. Now, if you don't mind, Agent Whatever, it's Saturday and I'd like to get some sleep."

Danny went to swing the door closed, but to his surprise, the cop on the porch shot out a hand and pushed the door back open in his face.

"Not so fast," he said. "This isn't just about you and your fiancé, Mr Ellis. Some recent homicides have been scattered across the state that may have a connection to what happened to your fiancé two years ago."

That snapped Danny's attention, even if it was ungodly early on a Saturday. The fog of fatigue and indignation started to resolutely clear from his head, allowing a level of understanding he didn't necessarily want to grasp.

"Homicides, connected to Mavis - what the hell are you talking about?"

"I'll explain everything Mr Ellis but I'd rather not do it on the porch with the cat lady next door. May I come in?"

Danny frowned, squinting, the fog in his head clearing enough to really process this guy. The fed was tall, had a head or so on him, probably about six feet. He had short, spiked dark blonde hair and sharp green eyes. He wore a regular-looking dark blue suit and an unimaginative black tie over a white collared shirt. A silver ring clung to one hand, but other than that, nothing really stood out about him aside from the way the suit stretched slightly over his shoulders and tapered loosely at his waist - the guy was built. He was regarding Danny through the tops of his eyes, but the gaze was already boring holes in him.

"Yeah, okay," Danny replied slowly, pulling the door back.

The fed gave him a curt nod and slid into his living room, turning to watch Danny as he shuffled into the room and dropped onto the couch, raising a hand by way of inviting the fed to do the same. He cast his eyes around Danny's small living room briefly before he followed his lead, taking a seat on the couch across the coffee table from a still-glaring Danny.

"What were you talking about homicide?" Danny asked.

The fed looked momentarily surprised that Danny was taking charge of the conversation, but he answered almost immediately.

"Firstly, can you tell me what happened to your fiancé two years ago?"

Danny frowned. "Hey, you said it was connected to what happened to Mavis. To reach that conclusion, you obviously already know what happened. I'm really not interested in rehashing this for another cop."

"Please, Mr Ellis, I need to know what you saw happen, not what was in some small-town sheriff's report in Belleville."

Danny drew a deep breath, levelling the enquiring fed with his eyes and deciding whether or not to cooperate. What the hell. He was awake now, and if there was the chance that this could possibly get any worse, he may as well know about it now, and obviously the cop wasn't going to tell him without dredging up everything that happened two years ago, yet again. The green eyes were watching him steadily.

"Okay," Danny sighed, pushing his hands between his knees. "Well, as you know if you read the report, Mavis was murdered by her psycho ex-husband who'd been stalking her for ages. But I'll tell you the whole damn story if you want. Mavis married young, eighteen. They were married six years, and she always said he was kind of possessive and a nasty piece of work, but not really abusive or anything. Until she broke it off and legally divorced him a year before we met, and then, he'd come after her once and busted her cheekbone. Mavis was sort of forced to be always on the move. Scared, I guess, that he'd catch up with her again if she stopped. But then she met me, and that changed. Within a year we were engaged, living together, happy. No sign of Ambrose, the psycho ex. Then one day I come home from work and there's a dead rooster on my doorstep. I whinged about city sanitation to Mavis, but she looked like she'd seen a ghost. Started panicking, packing things up, saying we had to leave, that Ambrose had found her again. I had no idea what she was talking about, but finally got her to calm down and tell me what was going on - looks like what she meant when she said he was a piece of work was that he was some kind of Satanist freak or something, spells and voodoo and whatever. Said he used to use all that superstitious crap to control her, scare her. The dead rooster was supposed to be a symbol of black magic or something. She was scared, though, like she really believed it all. Like she believed he could hurt her with a dead bird. I told her this was nothing to do with Satan and everything to do with some manipulative jerk who didn't know when to let go, and we should just go and make a report of harassment. She agreed in the end, but man she was scared, like it wouldn't be enough to protect her, especially when the cops told her she had no actual proof it was Ambrose. Anyways, after the rooster, it just kept going. Little things found around the place - one time, a necklace of Mavis', a locket that he had given her on their wedding night that she had left behind when she ditched him. He'd stuck it in a little black box with a chain and a lock twisted around it and a piece of his hair inside. Mavis freaked out, saying he was putting spells on her, chaining her to Ambrose. Then there were phonecalls where someone was chanting on the other end, some foreign language, and after a while she wouldn't answer the phone anymore, saying if she heard the chanting he would have power over her. Her soul, or spirit or something."

Danny rubbed his forehead with the heel of one hand. Christ he hated that bastard Ambrose. Recounting the worst thing to happen to him in his entire life to some nosy fed wasn't his idea of a good Saturday morning. He sighed and pushed on - may as well finish it.

"Anyway. By then I'd pretty much had enough, and I went back to the cops and screamed about how they could let her be harassed like this, it was psychological abuse. I mean, he'd been tangled up with the cops before, they'd interviewed him and everything. Couldn't they match the voice on the calls with Ambrose, prove it was him threatening her? By then Mave was freaked, said we should just move on, keep moving or he'd find us and hurt her. Said she could sometimes catch sight of him out of the corner of her eye, and when she looked back he was gone. She said he was coming, getting closer, and she was afraid for me."

Danny stopped, swallowed. It didn't hurt anymore, not really. He'd pretty much used up his allotted quota of hurt that first year after it happened. Now, he was just tired and fed up. He glanced up at the fed, who hadn't said a word, but was leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands loosely laced, green eyes watching him unflinchingly.

"So we went back to the cops - there was this guy, a detective with the domestic violence unit - who had said he might be able to do something about it. We were on our way to see him when Ambrose made his move. Jumped us in the alley behind the parking lot not two blocks from the cops. He was babbling something, same foreign language he used in the calls, and he threw something at her, some stuff they later told me had been herbs and shit. Then he took a step back, and shot her. End of story."

The fed nodded.

"And Mr Litvinov was never arrested, or connected to the murder of your fiancé in any way?"

"No," replied Danny dully. "Some bureaucratic shit about being unauthorized to use the footage from the interview he had with the cops a few years before to match the voice on the phone calls. Besides, we were two blocks from the police station, and it was generally a nice part of town, y'know? When someone heard Mave screaming and then heard the gunshot, they called the cops who were there in about ten seconds. He was nowhere anywhere near, not a trace of the scumbag. We had no proof that he had been harassing her, and had no proof that he had shot her. Mave was dead, and I only had my word."

"What about the physical evidence?" the fed asked.

"What?"

"You were shot too, according to the report. The round couldn't be traced?"

Danny shook his head. "I was behind Mavis when Ambrose shot her. The bullet went clean through her, caught me. They removed it, but said it was some home made job, silver with things scratched in it. Symbols or something. Typical."

The fed was frowning, the green eyes flickering quickly in thought, though Danny couldn't imagine why. He took advantage of the guy's distraction to head him off asking any more questions.

"You said there had been homicides and they were connected to Mavis. Well, I told you everything I know, care to return the favour?"

"Huh?" the fed looked up at him, and he suddenly wondered how old this guy was. His manner of tight, stuffy, but controlled confidence had somehow made Danny accept his claims without question, but suddenly he looked young. Probably younger than Danny himself. The impression lasted only a moment, though, and in a blink the bland mask was back in place, and Danny couldn't really have said what it was he thought he glimpsed, but he was frowning at the fed now, and his too-early-Saturday-morning guest had definitely got more interesting.

"Right. There has been six homicides across the state the past year. No obvious connection, but after some digging, I found one common denominator. You. You have moved six times in the past year, and every time you did, someone died in a very specific way."

"How's that?" Danny asked slowly, suspicious.

"The victims died of an apparent gunshot to the right side of the chest, though no round, no casing, no powder residue, or anything else to indicate a gunshot was ever found. Not even the sound of a round fired, or any of the usual trace evidence inside the wounds. The only thing that was found was evidence of silver, and a very specific residue of five herbs used in binding magic."

Danny blinked at the fed for a moment in silence.

"Magic," he said flatly.

"Yes."

"What the hell is this?" Danny asked, with a noise that may have been a laugh if there was any humour in it. "Magic? There's no such thing as magic. What the hell has this got to do with me?"

"Look," the fed began, and again that flicker of _something _seemed to slip through the standard cop exterior. 'It doesn't matter if you believe in magic or not. The point is, you believe that Ambrose Litvinov shot and killed your fiancé, and capped you two for one. You also know Litvinov believed in magic, and was using it to intimidate Mavis, who also believed in it. You said yourself that the bullet used was silver, with markings carved into it, and before he killed her, Litvinov threw something at Mavis that you later found out to be herbs. You also just told me that Litvinov was never identified, and Mavis Wells' murder is still unsolved. I'm telling you that there have been six unidentified murders involving a phantom bullet that doesn't seem to exist from a gun no one heard, saw or could find any traces of, in all six towns you've lived in in the past year. It's the exact way your fiancé died, except in Mavis' case, the evidence actually made sense. Weird sense, but it added up. These last six are like echoes of her death, but there is no way that the deaths could be taken as anything near normal."

Danny stuttered, lost for words, for a few moments before he stood up, facing a palm at the fed, who was watching him from the couch through his lashes, his face set.

"What, are you saying you believe I have something to do with this? That I'm - what - re-enacting my girl's death in every shitty town I've lived in the past year? You saying I'm responsible for this?"

"Not directly."

"What does that mean!"

The fed huffed a sigh. "Look, Daniel, I'm not saying you killed anybody, okay? I'm saying these deaths are connected to you, to what happened to Mavis, and whether you believe it or not, to what Ambrose Litvinov believed and practised."

Danny was standing in front of the window, hands on hips, regarding the fed with a mixture of horror and surprise.

"Okay," he said after a moment, "say they're connected to me. I don't know how, but I'll go with it. What are you saying is going on here?"

"Why did you move?" the fed asked suddenly.

"What?" Danny replied, taken aback.

"You moved six times in one year, Daniel. Why?"

"I just …" god, why had he kept on the move? This fed may be a little crazy, but even to a cracked fed, it was still going to sound nuts. "I just … it was a lot of things. Mavis, just before she died, kept saying we had to move, to keep moving, or he'd find and hurt us. I guess it just kind of … stuck in me. I loved Mavis. I was set to marry the girl. But after she died I … hell, it was grief or something, but I kept feeling like she was there. And it scared me, okay? I just thought if I kept moving, I could move on from her, too. Not feel like she was always there, one step behind me. I just wanted to move on. I guess that extended to my address, as well."

The fed's green eyes watched him, assessing, for a moment before he nodded.

"Did you ever see Ambrose Litvinov again after the shooting?"

"No. Guy was after Mavis, not me."

The fed nodded again.

"Hang on," Danny's mind finally caught up with a jolt of shock, "you think Ambrose is behind this? Tailing me? What - _taunting _me with replaying Mave's death everywhere I go?"

The fed's mouth ticked up in a shrug, head tilting in concession. "It's a possibility."

"Why the fuck would he want to do that?"

"From what you said, Litvinov was possessive of Mavis. Maybe he didn't like another guy on his turf."

"But Mave is _dead, _a fact that Ambrose made pretty damn sure of himself. If this is some kind of twisted if-I-can't-have-her-no-one-can shit, then mission accomplished, I can't have her either because that freak took her away from me. Makes no sense he'd have any interest in me after she's gone."

The fed said nothing, but the green eyes were flickering back and forth in thought again, and Danny was starting to get angry. He'd put all this to bed. Despite the moves, despite the memories and the damage that the experience had done, he was over it. Or so he thought. Before he could form anything coherent to say, however, the fed looked up at him and asked "where is Mavis buried?"

"What?!"

The fed closed his eyes briefly.

"I know this sounds massively crazy, but can we skip to the part where you just tell me where she was buried?"

Danny forced a breath in and out, clenched his eyes shut against rising anger at this insanity on a Saturday morning, and focused back on the fed.

"Not that I can see how that matters, but Mave was cremated. She was brainwashed by that asshole ex of hers into thinking that if she was buried or anything of her remained, he could use it somehow. Like he could get her even in death. God, this is so fucked up."

He slumped back into the couch again, the fed following his every move.

The green eyes bored into him for a moment, before the fed nodded and unexpectedly stood up.

"Thanks for your time, Daniel. If this turns into anything, I'll get back to you."

"That's it?" Danny asked, feeling completely off balance.

The fed arched an eyebrow at him. "You don't exactly look like this is your favourite subject," he said. As if in afterthought, he dug in the inside pocket of his jacket and handed a bemused Danny a card.

"You think of anything, give me a call, okay?"

"Yeah," Danny said faintly. "Sure."

The fed nodded and headed toward the door, then stopped and half-turned back toward Danny, hand on the knob.

"I really am sorry about your fiancé, Daniel."

"Yeah," Danny replied. "Me too."


	3. Chapter 3 : Research major

When Danny was younger, before losing Mavis had blown a hole though his life just as completely as the bullet that killed her had blown a hole in his ribs, he had been a few semesters at university studying investigative journalism. He had had some stupid idealistic idea that journalists exposed all the wrongs being done to the little people, people without a voice being oppressed, that they brought people to account for themselves and unearthed all their dark, dirty little secrets. He had soon realized that idealistic point of view had been that of exactly what he had been - an optimistic young man with very little experience with bitterness and cynicism. Or reality, for that matter. Despite the fact that Danny was now both bitter and cynical, and had more experience with harsh reality than he ever wanted to, he still knew how to research, and still had the patience to see results. He rubbed his face, feeling stiff, and pushed the laptop away. The digital clock on the microwave read 11:23pm.

Something about the unconventional fed that had banged on his door too early the previous morning had rattled Danny. Until then, he had thought Mavis' death and all the weird shit that went with it was in the past. And with each new town, he was putting that past further and further behind him. It was background noise, static, a worry that took a backseat these days to the mundane reality of his present. The fed on his doorstep had bought it all back. He thought about the fed asking him why he moved around so much, and the question - or rather, the complete honest answer to the question - bothered him. He hadn't lied when he'd told the cop that part of the reason he kept on the move was because he always felt as if Mavis was there, just one step behind catching up to him, just like she had always felt like Ambrose was just one step from catching her. He'd wanted to shake the feeling that she was there, that somehow she was still with him, as if he'd turn around and there she'd be, behind him. But that had been grief talking. Feeling like someone you loved and lost was still there with you was a normal side effect of loss, right? Yeah, he didn't know if he believed it himself anymore. What bothered him even more was the feeling frightened him. He'd loved Mavis more than he'd ever loved anyone in his life, before he met her or since, and yet the feeling that she was always there, just a step from catching up to him, scared him. A curse on the day Ambrose Litvinov had come into either of their lives. Guy was the fucking devil. To make him afraid of even the memory of the woman he had loved like life itself was dark and twisted.

And what of the fed's theory? That somehow, all these weird deaths that were like echoes of Mavis' murder somehow following him wherever he went? Like he could never really outrun any of this, no matter how completely he denied the creepy feeling and resolved to get on with his life? Maybe he couldn't run. Maybe these strange deaths, if the fed were to be believed, proved what he already knew. That the memory of Mavis and whatever darkness Ambrose had brought on her was now forever on his tail following her death.

He rubbed his eyes. Christ, he was sounding as cracked as the fed. His hand slipped off the laptop, and fingered the white rectangular card the fed had left him. What the hell. He grabbed the cordless, hesitated a moment, then dialled.

_"Yeah?"_

"Ambrose Litvinov is still alive," Danny answered the fed's hail without preamble.

There was a sigh of something that sounded suspiciously like resignation on the other end of the line.

_"I know."_

Okay, so not a total shocker, guy was a cop after all. He was probably doing his homework, just like Danny.

"D'you - d'you think that he's behind this? That freak is still stalking me or something?"

_"I don't know, Mr Ellis -"_

"Danny," Danny interrupted. Only salesmen and door-to-door preachers called him "Mr Ellis."

_"Okay, Danny. I don't know, but I doubt it."_

A sardonic smile twisted Danny's face. Ironic, that being stalked by the Satan-worshipping homicidal ex who murdered his fiancé right in front of him and landed him in critical condition in ICU was actually the most reasonable explanation here.

He felt suddenly exhausted.

"What is going on, then?"

A pause on the line. _"I'm not sure yet, but just in case you're getting cooler with crazy, let me ask you something. Mavis was shot to the right side of her chest, right?"_

"Yeah."

_"You were standing behind her, and got hit with the same bullet. Where'd it get you?"_

Danny's hand unconsciously strayed to the scar high on the right side of his ribs. Mavis had been smaller than him, small enough to fit so perfectly against his side where the scar from the bullet that killed her now puckered the skin and pulled at the muscle, translating a deep ache in his bones that had never seemed to shift.

"Right side, high up on the ribs."

Again, silence on the line.

"What now?"

_"I didn't tell you this, but that is just about where all the wounds were on the other six victims."_

Danny closed his eyes, willing it away.

"What the _hell_ is going on here?"

_"Okay, this is going to sound massively, massively crazy, but … Ambrose Litvinov was, probably still is, a witch. He used that against Mavis, to control her, scare her. When he was "harassing" her, as you put it, he was working the steps to a binding spell, designed to capture Mavis' spirit and bind her to him. Loser probably knew he could never get her back in life, so chained her spirit and killed her, keeping her trapped with him. But then something happened that as far as I can tell, Litvinov himself didn't even realize, and somehow, Mavis' bound spirit ended up chained to you, instead."_

"What …" Danny whispered. He had sat silent and numb through this whole speech, feeling oddly disconnected, like it wasn't really happening. But he had just taken a sharp nose-dive into complete craziness that he couldn't just roll with. This was nuts.

_"Look, ghosts are usually born out of violent death, okay? Mavis was murdered by a scumbag she was terrified of, she probably knew that you got hit and was terrified you were fried, too. Cross that with Litvinov's twisted magic and you have a supernatural mess that has been dogging you for the last two years, Danny. Torturing Mavis, screwing up your life and costing six other people theirs."_

"Okay just - just stop right there, Agent Mulder. What the hell are you talking about? What are you some kind of Satan-worshipping freak like Ambrose was? Why the hell you looking into this, anyways, pounding on my door asking weird questions about Mavis? What you want from me?"

_"Danny -"_

"Where the hell you get off spinning crazy stories like this? I _loved _Mavis, and yeah I was pretty fucking screwed up when she died, it was grief, that's all! Where the hell you get off playing on that?"

_"Hold on, Danny, slow down -"_

"I don't know what the hell you think you're playing at man, but it's low. These deaths have nothing to do with me, y'hear? I don't want to see you snooping -"

"**_Listen to me!"_**

And to his own surprise, Danny did. It was an order, and Danny could no more refuse than he could make Agent Mulder himself and this whole twisted mess just go away.

_"Look, Danny, you're freaking out, and okay, I get it. But you're not an idiot. You know something is wrong with this whole deal, you've known it since Mavis died. You know whatever is dogging you isn't just grief, and you know this string of deaths is too familiar to be coincidence. Now, I can stop this, okay, I promise, it's what I do. Stop bad crap from happening to good people - like your fiancé. Like you. But I'm going to need your help, Danny, can you do that?"_

Danny had been listening with his jaw clenched, eyes squeezed shut. Could he?

"What … what do you mean, my help?"

_"Okay, from what I can tell, this isn't Litvinov's doing - at least not deliberately. I don't think he's behind this mess that's obviously following you, any more than you're responsible for it. It just … got twisted. I think that a freak like Litvinov bound Mavis' spirit to him, so he could control her, so she couldn't escape him after death. But somehow, when he carried out the final step - killing Mavis - something screwed up, and instead of binding her to himself as his ritual intended, her spirit somehow ended up bound to you, but uncontrolled. Danny, I think __**Mavis**_ _is responsible for the deaths. They're mirrors of how she died. She has no choice but to follow you, she's bound to you, and maybe she's been trying to tell you something."_

Danny had thought he could know no horror so complete as watching Mavis, his love, bleed to death right beside him. This was worse. The idea that Ambrose had wreaked some kind of twisted up evil he hadn't even believed in until about five minutes ago that resulted in Mavis' spirit or whatever being bound to him, replaying her own death in an attempt to tell him what his gut already knew, what he had been denying for the past two years - that she was still here, that there was something seriously wrong with her death that wasn't just tied to what an evil, manipulative prick Ambrose had been with all his mumbo-jumbo. That she would always be coming for him because she had no choice, and much like her life had ended, she would inevitably bring death and darkness with her.

_"Danny?"_

Danny realized he had been sitting in silence. He snapped out of it enough to realize he was shaking, and covered in cold sweat.

"Oh god, Mave."

_"Hey, take it easy Danny, stay with me here."_

Danny swallowed hard. "What - what am I supposed to do?"

He wasn't at all surprised at the choked quality to his voice. It had been an unusual evening.

On the end of the line, Agent Mulder heaved a sigh.

"_I was going to track down Litvinov, ask him what the hell he did, if he can actually undo it, and if Mavis has been coming after him, too."_

"I don't - god, I don't want anyone else getting hurt."

_"I know."_

A horrible thought hit Danny with the force of a sledge hammer.

"Do you think she wants to kill me, like she killed those people?"

A pause. _"I don't know, Danny, spirits they … they don't exactly see straight. Mavis died a violent death, and her spirit has been bound through some twisted witchcraft Litvinov put on her. There's no knowing what she'll do."_

"What the hell am _I _supposed to do?"

_"Look, I'm staying in a motel not far from you. Think maybe you should come track down Litvinov with me. I can keep you safe if Mavis shows up."_

"How the hell do you know all this, anyways?" Danny asked, slapped with a cold moment of clarity.

_"It's kind of the family business."_

"You ain't FBI, are you."

_"Nope, I'm the guy who's going to save your ass, Danny."_


	4. Chapter 4 : Witch hunt

Danny hated Mondays. He hated them even more when he was cold, standing outside his house waiting for some crackpot ghostbuster to pick him up and track down a witch, to stop the disembodied spirit of his dead lover from committing more copycat murders. Sure, normal old Monday. It was made even worse when the Chevy that rolled to a stop at the kerb at his feet looked like something out of an old movie in which shadowy guys wore black bowler hats. He got in. The sharp green eyes of the man behind the wheel were the same as Agent Whatever's had been, but that elusive _something _about the guy from the previous Saturday was written all over him now. It wasn't just the Chevy, though it obviously helped. The so-called-fed had switched the unenthusiastic suit for a dark blue t-shirt, unbuttoned flannel shirt, brown leather jacket, jeans and boots. He was regarding Danny in a frankly assessing sort of way. Danny looked back at him.

"I don't even know your name."

The man's face twisted into a slightly feral grin he couldn't have imagined on buttoned-up Agent Whatever.

"It's Dean. Dean Winchester."

"I wish I could say it's nice to meet you, Dean."

"Tell me about it."

Ambrose Litvinov was not difficult to find, though the means by which Dean did it were ridiculously illegal.

"Yeah, thanks, I'll pass that on to the bureau."

He snapped the phone shut. Danny stared at him.

"How long you been doing this?" he asked.

Dean shot him a quick glance before his eyes settled back on the road.

"Long time."

"And you do a lot of it?"

"You could say that."

"Dude, you've probably racked up like, a life sentence in consecutive offences by now."

"I'm aware."

Danny pressed himself against the vinyl seats of the Chevy and stared sightlessly out the window.

"So, what're we going to do when we catch up with this … witch?"

"Ask him what the hell he did to bind your fiancé, put a gun to his head and see if that inspires him to reverse it. If it doesn't, he'll just have to tell us everything he does know and then … we'll see."

"We'll see?" Danny kept himself from actually yelping with effort.

Dean rolled his shoulders against the vinyl and said nothing.

This is unbelievably crazy, Danny thought. This is it. I've gone nuts.

Maybe Litvinov was easy to find because he wasn't hiding. The idea made Danny as vaguely uneasy as Dean's implied "we'll see." He could hardly believe he was tangled up in this mess and yet … he _was _this mess. Like it or not, he was at the centre of all this. This madcap may have apparently been Dean's day job, but he did it because of people like Danny. Poor sods who got themselves caught in the middle of something they didn't understand. And Mavis. Poor Mavis, dragged around the country unknowingly by him, screaming at him until the spirit, or whatever she was now, lost its grip on the human girl she had once been and resorted to showing him, replaying her death over and over in a plea of _I'm still here! This isn't right! It isn't over! _

Why didn't she just tell me, he thought. He didn't realize he'd voiced the sad question to the universe at large aloud until Dean answered him.

"Spirits they - they don't think like us anymore. They're in pain, Danny. They communicate the only way they know how."

His mouth twisted up into a quick, unexpected and slightly bitter grin.

"What?" Danny questioned it.

Dean shook his head. "Nothin'. Just sounded like someone else I know for a minute there."

Danny narrowed his eyes at the expression bleeding into Dean's features. It looked a lot like sorrow, like the loss he saw in his own expression after Mavis died, but … gentler.

"Someone you're missing, too?"

Dean shot him another quick glance - guarded, briefly, before the fight left his eyes and he shrugged his shoulders.

"Yeah, you could say that. Used to have some backup on the road, that's all."

And it was. Danny knew when to drop it.

It was ironic that Ambrose Litvinov lived in a towering, tottering, skinny apartment building that looked like a modern take-off of _Count Dracula. _Danny stood by the Chevy and eyed it dubiously. Dean, on the other hand, cranked up the Chevy's trunk, pulled up a false bottom and proceeded to shock the hell out of Danny.

"What the …"

Danny bent over the trunk, not missing the way Dean's sharp green eyes pinned him, the cocky, almost challenging expression that sharpened his face. Suddenly the guy was a creature from another world. The trunk was an arsenal, crammed with handguns, shotguns, rifles, knives, axes, bats, clubs. But also an assortment of things Danny couldn't place - talismans and brass symbols and shaved stakes. It was seriously like something out of horror movie. He looked up at Dean, who was watching him closely, a hand on the trunk of the Chevy.

"Are you serious?" Danny said.

"Deadly … a lot of the time."

He gave Danny another dose of the feral grin that would have immediately folded his FBI cover, and slammed the trunk, shoving a .45 into the waistband of his jeans and a knife into the inside pocket of his jacket. Danny frowned at the flask filled with salt that followed it, coupled with the twin that Dean shoved into his hands, instructing him curtly that if anything crazy happened, make a circle out of the salt and stand in it.

"What you want me to do?" he asked.

Dean stabbed him with a glance.

"Stay behind me and don't get yourself killed."

Great, Danny thought. Super, thanks.

Dean pounded on the apartment door, which jerked open enough to reveal half a face.

"You Litvinov?" Dean asked curtly.

Danny already knew that he was. Ambrose Litvinov looked exactly as Danny remembered him, and he had the sudden, stupid thought that maybe if he was a witch like Dean said, maybe witches didn't change or age, or whatever. Then again, he reminded himself, it had only been two years. Not a lot changed in two years. What had been a lifetime for him after Mavis' death had been only a moment for everyone else. The realization made him feel bizarrely alone.

"Maybe," Ambrose answered Dean's question, drawing Danny back into the present. "Why?"

Dean was a big guy, bigger than Danny who had let himself get even slighter in the time after Mavis was killed, and thus from Ambrose's perspective, Danny had been obscured by Dean's greater size and the cramped hallway up to that point. Surprising both Danny and Ambrose, Dean bladed his body to the side, revealing Danny standing with his hands shoved in his pockets behind him.

Ambrose's pale blue eyes widened in a way that would have been funny if the last time he'd seen those eyes hadn't been when Mavis was shot to death right in front of him.

"Fuck off," Ambrose half gasped, half ordered, but he backed away from the door just enough for Dean to shove his shoulder hard against it, sending it thudding even harder into Ambrose's face. Blood peppered the door jamb. Ambrose staggered backwards, holding his face, with Dean in close pursuit and Danny standing stunned at the threshold.

"Don't even think about it," Dean advised, the .45 somehow in his hands and at Ambrose's head without Danny having seen him draw it at all. Ambrose had dropped his hands from his bloody face and recovered from surprise enough to have lunged at Dean, brought up short by the appearance of the .45. He glared at Dean, Danny momentarily forgotten.

"We're gonna talk, man-witch."

"About what?" Ambrose asked.

Dean grinned. It was the scariest expression Danny had ever seen on anyone.

"Don't play dumb. You recognize Danny, here. Probably because the last time you saw him, you were murdering his girlfriend. Sound more familiar now?"

"Don't know what you mean," Ambrose diligently argued, but his eyes slid over Danny, sending the latter man cold.

He looked the same. The same as the day he murdered Mavis. The day he supposedly condemned her spirit to be dragged in agony across the country behind an unknowing Danny. The same cool blue eyes, the same pale, angular face, the same straggling black hair pulled back into a ponytail that had been outlawed by good taste since the early eighties. The voice was the same voice on the phone, chanting at Mavis and scaring her shitless. The same tall, skinny form that had stepped out of the cover of the dumpster and raised a gun at Mavis' chest. Danny was reeling, his grip slipping, sweat sheeting his body.

"Wasn't killing her enough?" Danny was as surprised as anyone that the voice was his - more surprised at the uncharacteristic venom in his tone. Even Dean cast him a quick look, and Ambrose's eyes came to rest on him, a slight frown between dark brows.

"Wasn't murdering her enough of a punishment just because she didn't want you, you sick fuck? What did you do to her?!"

God, he was losing it. Dean seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time. His lips flattened into a hard line, and he levelled Danny with his eyes.

"Easy, Danny."

His eyes snapped around the room, settling on the low table near a rickety wooden chair.

Dean's lips curled into a mirthless smile.

"Great thing about bad guys - they always have tools of the trade on hand. Lets make use of them, huh? Lets sit you nice and comfy where you sit your own victims. Danny, grab the rope and tie our friend to the chair, there."

Danny circled behind Ambrose to retrieve the ropes, swallowing at what looked very much like blood spattering the chair. Dean dug the barrel of the .45 into Ambrose's temple and growled "Move."

Ambrose obeyed, looking Dean in the eye and no doubt not liking what he saw.

With a hard shove to his chest Dean dropped Ambrose into the chair, and Danny quickly bound him up, being sure to tie the ropes far too tightly.

"Now, we know you worked some skewed mojo on Mavis Wells before you shot her two years ago, so we can skip the denial and get right to the part where you tell us exactly what you did to her, and exactly how we're going to reverse it."

Ambrose blinked at Dean, who was bent forward to get in the guy's face, the .45 pressed against his knee. He said nothing. Dean's hand whipped up to catch Ambrose brutally across the jaw with the barrel. The latter's jaw snapped shut - he bit into his tongue hard and spat blood with a snarl.

"Lets try this another way. How, exactly, did you completely screw up the simple binding spell you cast on Mavis Wells' spirit?"

"I didn't screw up anything," Ambrose snarled. "It was perfect."

"Perfect?" Dean straightened to smile at Danny behind Ambrose's chair. "You seem to have a weird definition of perfect. So, instead of binding to you a woman you apparently loved so much you were hell-bent on torturing for the rest of time, you somehow managed to bind her to Danny here, and inspire her to re-enact her own death every time Danny switched post-code?"

Ambrose's head jerked to take Danny in, his expression knitted into a genuinely confused scowl. Not good, Danny thought, and saw the same sentiment reflected back at him from Dean's sharp eyes.

"Ah, so you didn't know the spell transferred at all, did you. You thought you just couldn't get it up enough to make the mojo fly. Wow, that's pathetic."

Ambrose growled and struggled against the ropes.

"Okay, Oz. you're going to tell me what binding you used, and how exactly you screwed it up."

"I told you, I didn't screw it up! It was perfectly executed, there was no reason it didn't bind! And don't pretend you don't know what you're talking about and need me to explain a binding spell to you. You're a hunter!"

Ambrose spat the word as though it disgusted him, and Danny shot a confused look at Dean. Hunter? The bigger man's green eyes switched back to Ambrose.

"I know you used the five herbs, I know you know your Latin, I know you peddled all the usual party tricks to drag Mavis in psychologically, to make her believe. I know you had a tangible link to her. And I sure as hell know you're enough of a twisted son of a bitch to mean it. I know the final step was the inscribed silver rounds - what I don't know is why you didn't succeed, Litvinov. You're right. You should have."

"Tell me something I don't know!" the witch barked at Dean.

Dean straightened, and crossed his arms, regarding Ambrose thoughtfully.

"Where is the grimoire?"

Ambrose clenched his teeth, rage seething off him in waves. Danny was completely lost.

Dean's eyes flickered to the low-lying table that the chair had sat in front of, and his lips again twisted into a slow, feral grin.

"Don't you dare," growled Ambrose, reading the knowledge in Dean's expression that was completely alien to Danny.

"Danny, see if you can't find a big, leather-bound cook book for Satanic posers in that altar, there."

"Don't," snapped Ambrose. Dean ignored him, and Danny obeyed, searching the little table for a book and trying to ignore everything else he found there. Eventually, his fingers butted up against something that matched Dean's description, and he brought it over warily. Ambrose's eyes were glued to the book, and his face was white.

Still smiling, Dean flipped through the pages, apparently knowing exactly what he was looking for. He gripped the page in his fist and ripped it out. Ambrose flinched as though Dean had hit him.

Dean stuffed the page into his jacket pocket, his hand re-emerging with a lighter. Ambrose sucked in his breath. "Don't."

Dean uncapped the lighter, shook half the fluid onto the soft pages of the book, and kneeling, set it on fire.

Ambrose immediately howled, struggling against the bonds, cursing Dean half in English and half in something that sounded like the same language he chanted at Mavis - Latin, Dean had said.

"Save it," Dean advised, clearly unimpressed.

"I'll kill you!" Ambrose shrieked. "You know I will!"

Again, that smile that Danny found incredibly unnerving on Dean.

"Not if I kill you first," he said.

His words seemed to echo in Danny's head. _We'll see. _Oh, this was going way too far. Ambrose had murdered Mavis. That made him an evil bastard in Danny's book. What did that make Dean if he killed Ambrose in return? What did that make himself?

"Dean…"

"See, what you may not know about witches, Danny, is that most of these bitches have no power of their own. Nada. Squat. And what does have the power they use? Well, it's more than happy to come debt collecting."

"You - you're not going to …" Ambrose suddenly stuttered.

Dean smiled. "As you said, Litvinov, I can't leave you as a loose end if I expect to live out the week. You should have thought of this before you bound and murdered an innocent woman. Send me a post card from Hell."

Leaving Ambrose to struggle against the bonds from sheer terror rather than rage now, Dean crossed the room to the altar and apparently found what he was looking for. The little, twisted conglomeration of materials, its skin crawling with jagged sigils, joined the bonfire of the grimoire, and Ambrose went suddenly still, his eyes empty.

"I'm not going to kill you," Dean told him, and Danny was surprised at the heaviness and sorrow in his voice. This guy was one hell of a puzzle.

"I'm going to let you settle your own score with your boss. This is your bed, Litvinov. Lie in it."

He tipped his head at Danny, who took his cue and followed Dean out the door. The last glimpse he got of the man who had shattered his life was of Ambrose still, hands bound to the chair behind him, the ritual items burning at his feet, looking like he had just received a death sentence. An unearthly shadow that was cast from no visible light in the room had started to close around Ambrose.


	5. Chapter 5 : Ghost whispering

His head was still reeling. Wordlessly, Dean had driven the Chevy to the motel he mentioned, and slipped inside, leaving Danny to stumble after him, feeling weirdly hung-over. Once inside, Dean snapped the lid of a laptop up and retrieved the page of Ambrose's book from his jacket pocket, smoothing it out on the table. He squinted at it, cursed, then reached for a cellphone. Danny sank onto the edge of the nearest bed and looked around him numbly.

"Bobby, it's Dean. I know what time it is. Will you listen for a second? I've got a botched binding spell on my hands mixed up with a vengeful spirit. Long story. Look, I need to find out what went wrong, why this didn't work for the freak who cast it. Yeah, it's already been destroyed, debt collector should be shivving his ass right now. But I've still got the spirit to deal with. No, it doesn't look like it was connected, it's this other poor bastard in the middle of it - civilian. Yep. Yep. Nope, cremated, already been down that road. I know, Bobby, but there's nothing … okay, if I send you a picture of the sigils? It's got to be the bullet, freaking witch or not, the son of a bitch knew what he was doing. Okay, thanks Bobby. I will, if I ever see him again. Yeah. Thanks."

Dean clicked to end that odd conversation, took a picture of the leaf from Ambrose's book, and presumably sent it to the Bobby he had been talking to.

He dragged a hand down his face, and turned back toward Danny as if he had just remembered he was there.

"Wow, hey, easy Danny."

Danny looked up at him from the bed, confused. Dean was suddenly right in front of him, gripping his shoulders with strong hands.

"Just take a breath, dude."

He disappeared from view, and reappeared with a bottle of water he foisted on Danny.

"Sorry. I forget about the weird, sometimes."

That was not reassuring to Danny, who closed his eyes, curling his hand around the scar high on his ribs. Dean's eyes followed the motion, frowning.

"He didn't get you, did he? You hurt?"

Danny shook his head. "No. Old - old wound."

Dean nodded, expression bland, then something nameless snapped into his features and he stared at Danny's hand as if it had just dropped off.

"Oh for the love of …"

He clenched his jaw and closed his eyes briefly, and Danny was mildly surprised that he could actually feel more confused.

"Danny," Dean began in a forcibly measured tone. "You said the bullet that killed Mavis got you, too. And that it was removed during surgery, and that was how you knew about the silver, and the markings, right?"

Danny nodded. Dean echoed him.

"Was the bullet intact, or fragmented?"

Danny frowned. He was suddenly finding it hard to think. Something was wrong …

"It, uh. It was all broken up. Home made job, not durable. Something about silver being a soft metal."

Dean gave him a tight smile that was more of a grimace.

"Did they remove it all?"

"Think so."

"Not sure?"

Danny shook his head, and Dean introduced him to some brave new curse words. He stood, shoved his hands into his hair, and paced in a tight circle. Danny watched without comprehension. Something was going on … his right side and chest ached, and he could taste metal in his mouth like blood. Was that gunpowder he could smell?

"There's no other way," Dean said, apparently to himself. He looked at Danny, who was not reassured that his strange companion was starting to look slightly sick.

"Okay. Just hang in there, okay, Danny?"

Danny nodded. Yeah, sure thing.

Dean pushed him back easily onto the bed, and poured a large circle of salt around it. Danny watched him blearily. God, his chest hurt. Was this how Mavis felt? Was this how she, or her spirit, had been feeling for two years, while he expertly moved on with his life like a self-help guru, forgetting about the witch that murdered her? Was he that much of an asshole?

"Still with me, Danny?" enquired Dean's voice from somewhere near his feet. When stressed Dean had a strange, almost southern accent, and Danny wondered idly where this guy was from. If he was really there at all, and it wasn't just that Danny had finally gone completely nuts and invented him. A sluggish smile crawled onto his face at the idea of him imagining something like Dean Winchester. Dean was clattering with something at the foot of the bed, and then his cell phone rang. Danny could hear him cursing fluidly.

"Bobby - I know. I know! Shitty surgery, probably didn't get it all out. I don't know! I'm hoping the supernatural is actually going to be helpful here, Mavis' spirit has been pretty specific. Yeah, I'm hoping it'll rise to the spot. Not long, he's already fading out on me, shit, Bobby. No, no, no. Don't call him, for the love of God. I can handle this, Bobby. I gotta go."

The cellphone snapped shut, Dean clattered some more, and suddenly his cool hands were at Danny' side, cutting his shirt off him.

"Hey, you still with me, Danny?"

"Mmm."

"Good. Look alive, dude. You're going to be okay, nothing bad's gonna happen to you."

Again, like in the car, the words sounded like they were intended for someone else.

There was the unmistakable sound of a racked shotgun, and Danny felt his body flush hot.

"Listen to me if you can still hear me, Danny. This is going to hurt. I can't take you to the ER because some serious supernatural shit is about to go down and the medical profession usually isn't cool with that. Just hold on, okay? It'll all be over soon."

And with that, the right side of his ribs and chest caught fire.

Danny arched up involuntarily, back bowing, too shocked to scream. He could vaguely feel blood flowing, hear Dean's litany of curses, feel something hot, sharp, agonizing. He could feel his lungs filling up, drowning him, and coughed blood thick in his mouth.

"God damn it," Dean snarled, and then Danny heard a voice he never though he'd hear again.

"Danny."

Even Dean's painful ministrations paused a moment before he dived back in, but Danny's wavering focus was instantly arrested by the woman who stood just outside the salt ring.

Oh, God, Mavis. He reached his hand out toward her, even as Dean dug deeper, and something pulled unbearably in his chest, like his ribs were rising through his skin.

"Mave," Danny groaned. "I'm sorry."

"He came for me. I could never escape him, Danny. And now it's you. It never stops. Let me go, let me go!"

"What? Mave, I never -"

His words were cut off in a sharp scream, and he heard the blast of Dean's shotgun, coupled with an irritated answering bang and a curse from a room a few doors down.

Mavis' image disappeared, and it was more than Danny's strung out heart could take right then.

"No, Mave," he sobbed, feeling the tears but not really caring.

Dean dropped the shotgun, and once again bent over his side.

"Almost there, Danny. Hang in there man. It's almost over."

With a hiss Dean apparently found what he was looking for, and there was the brief flare of flame, and then silence.

"Don't you die on me!" Dean's voice snarled as Danny's vision blackened, and he hoped his inability to disobey when Dean gave an order extended to life and death. Danny's last thought was to wonder if he was dead already.

Danny's sense of hearing returned before anything.

He could hear traffic, and a woman giggling distantly. He could hear the hum of an air conditioner, and the scuff of shoes.

He didn't know what the hell was going on, but couldn't care right then. He just wanted to pass out again, and preferably stay that way, though he couldn't remember why.

Then he heard a voice. A voice he knew.

"No, sir. It's fine, really. I'm sure. Yeah, I got the coordinates last night. I can be there in three days, maybe four, just got to deal with this guy first. I know, I will."

Snap.

Dean's words were clipped as though he were reporting to a military superior, but his voice sounded rough and tense. There was a weight behind his tone that sounded like habitual exhaustion.

Danny opened his eyes, and found Dean Winchester, who for the moment, appeared not to know he was being watched. He was sitting hunched forward in a chair at the small round table, cellphone still in one hand, his face in the other. He looked tired and weighed down. He rubbed his face off, pulled in a breath, and looked over at Danny. The green eyes held shadows as they settled on him.

"Hey, you actually conscious this time?"

That didn't sound good. Danny tried to reply, but his throat was dry and thick and he swore he could taste blood in his mouth. He tried to move, and pain assaulted the right side of his chest and ribs, and he flattened, biting back a groan.

A moment later Dean was back with a glass of water.

"Take it slow," he advised.

It helped somewhat, to both soothe his throat and clear his head.

"What happened?"

Dean arched his eyebrows.

"You sure you want to do this now? You just had your ass kicked by a supernaturally resurrected ex-girlfriend."

"What -"

Dean sighed.

"Look, Danny, all you really need to know is that it's over. Mavis is put to rest, you're okay, and no one else is in danger. And Litvinov is dead, but no harm there."

"You - ?"

Dean shook his head. "Nothing to do with me, I swear. Guy's paid his due, is all."

Danny swallowed determinedly.

"How long I been here?"

"Two days," Dean conceded reluctantly. "I was about to hook an IV in."

Danny grimaced.

"Tell me what happened Dean. Please."

Dean nodded, and settled himself on the opposite bed. Danny vaguely wondered why there were two, thought maybe Dean was meeting up with Bobby, whoever he was.

"After we paid Litvinov a visit and reneged his witness protection from Hell, debt collector came calling and finished him off. I'm not losing sleep over that one. We came back here to work out why Mavis' spirit was still bound even though it was pretty much guaranteed Litvinov, who worked the spell, was dead. You started to fade out on me, and Bobby found out the sigils from Litvinov's grimoire, the same he carved into the bullet, dealt with harnessing flesh to spirit. The sick son of a bitch actually tried to trap Mavis' spirit using his own body as an anchor. But these things can be loosely interpreted, especially by spirits, and as luck would have it, that bullet carrying the sigils binding spirit to flesh ended up in you, binding her spirit, with your flesh. If he'd actually had his way - Litvinov was still a witch. A twisted sucker, but he knew a few tricks. He would have controlled Mavis' spirit, like he tried to control her in life. You - well, you had no idea what was going on. You were just some poor sap who got shot. Mavis' spirit was bound, but not controlled. She couldn't just come out and tell you, as Litvinov's spell was designed to bind her to him, and with his follow-up … just trust me that everything went right to hell. She tried to tell you the only way she could. I don't think she was evil, Danny. Just twisted. In a way she was even trying to tell you how to free her - the fragment of the bullet they missed was still in your ribs. She mirrored that in the other six victims. That bullet got her, too. It was what killed her, and she had a strong connection to it even without Litvinov's binding magic making it worse. While that fragment was in you, this wasn't going away. She was tied to that fragment so … I had to get it out. Salt and burn - rest in peace, Mavis Wells."

"Get - get it out?"

Dean grimaced. "Yeah. Sorry, man."

Danny squeezed his eyes closed, then looked down. The right side of his chest and ribs was wrapped in white dressings. He'd just had surgery. Again. In a motel room, with no anaesthetic, by a stranger who hunted ghosts for a living.

"Oh, God."

Dean gave him a lopsided smile.

"So … what now?" Danny asked when he was sure he could speak again.

Dean pushed himself up from the bed and wandered over to the laptop.

"Weird mirror deaths have stopped, I'm pretty sure you're a free man. I guess this time you really do move on with your life."

The latter was said with bitterness that had Danny propping himself on his elbows, despite the pain, to stare curiously at Dean. He pushed himself straighter against the headboard and brushed a hand over his wrapped ribs.

"I don't know if I even believed you, not really. Even when I agreed to this madness, to find Ambrose, I think I only did it because I couldn't think of anything else to do. I don't know if I even believe it now."

"You and everybody else," Dean replied darkly.

Danny frowned at him, really looking. Ever since he'd met Dean he had been something else - first, an unwelcome, unconventional federal cop too early on a Saturday morning asking questions Danny didn't want to answer. Then, Danny had suspected Dean was just nuts, some kind of ghost-chasing paranormal investigator or something you see on bad reality TV, with an uneasy knack for fraud. But he'd gone along with it because he couldn't think of anything else to do - and maybe to prove to himself that he was as nuts as Dean, thinking that his dead girlfriend was still following him. To convince himself Ambrose had just been the quintessential psycho ex and nothing more. After that, Dean had been something from another world, doing and saying things Danny had thought were impossible when he woke up that Saturday to the pounding on his door. A hunter. A creature from a sci-fi story.

Now as held his ribs and really looked at Dean sitting hunched in the chair in front of the laptop, he was suddenly just a guy. Danny tilted his head in thought. Dean was dressed similarly to how he had been that night - boots, jeans, long sleeved grey Henley. Danny wondered why he hadn't noticed the odd golden charm Dean wore around his neck before. The heavy brown leather jacket was slung over the opposite bed. Danny put Dean to be roughly in his mid twenties, so reasonably young, but his expression was an odd mixture of tiredness and cockiness, green eyes shuttered.

The last few days had been surreal for Danny, and Dean Winchester had seemed larger than life. Maybe it was just the circumstances in which he'd met this guy, but Danny found himself uncharacteristically curious. Again, Ambrose's words came back to him - he had called Dean a hunter, as if that was a separate species. All Danny had really seen of Dean had been the Chevy. He swept his eyes more critically around the small motel room than he had been able to when under attack by Mavis' spirit several days before. There was a duffel bag with the arm of a shirt hanging out on the floor, next to a second duffel of weapons. Danny skittered his eyes back to the table, where a laptop was propped up with several windows of news stories spread across the screen, next to a battered leather-bound journal. A discarded take-out bag sat on the floor by the table leg. The bed on which he lay was still ringed in salt.

"I got to get my head around all this," Danny said, rubbing a hand across the back of his head. "What about you?"

"What?"

"I heard some of what you said on the phone. That guy, Bobby? Is he coming to meet you?"

"What - no. No, I just called the old man for advice."

"So, what, you just go find the next ghost?"

"Pretty much."

"Dean … is this what you do all the time? Ambrose said you were a hunter, like that was what you were, rather than what you were doing. You hunt ghosts and - and God knows what else?" He looked around, again noting the second bed. "You do this alone?"

Dean was watching him with an unreadable expression. Something had deliberately closed behind his eyes. Danny pushed, even though he knew he probably shouldn't.

"And why are there two beds in here?"

"You should have stuck with the journalism, Danny."

Danny conceded with a laugh at that, and immediately regretted it as the stitches in his side flared. Dean smiled grimly, but said nothing.

"So, this is what you do. Your job? How long you been doing this?"

Dean looked for a moment like he intended to deflect Danny's sudden questioning again, but seemed to understand this was Danny trying to understand what had happened to him, not only simple curiosity about Dean himself. He pushed himself to his feet to pour a cup of coffee.

"Long time. It kind of runs in the family."

"Your whole family do this?"

Dean's expression tightened. Danny wasn't usually good at reading people, but he didn't have to be at the moment. It was obvious there was more in that.

"My dad."

Danny decided to leave that topic alone for a while.

"So … you just travel around in that monster Chevy looking for things … things like what Mavis was, spirits, to hunt?"

Danny wondered fractally how someone like Dean supported himself on this apparently endless road trip - then he remembered the talent for fraud.

"Yeah spirits, monsters, demons, witches. Stuff like that. 'S my job."

Danny was staring at him. He knew it. Something was happening at the back of his mind that he couldn't put a name to. Dean was probably the strangest person he had ever met. Was this all he owned? A bag of clothing and a bag of weapons, shoved in the back of a Chevy? Did he have a home, a family, a regular job somewhere? Somehow, Danny doubted it. There was a look to travellers and drifters - Danny himself was halfway there - and Dean had the look of someone who had spent a long time on the road. He'd said his family did this. His dad. How had Dean ended up here? Was his story anything like Danny's? He eyed Dean, not knowing really what to ask or how to ask it.

"How do you know how to deal with this?"

Danny had meant how did Dean learn how to handle all things supernatural, but for some reason, Dean's face darkened into something that Danny thought looked like loss and sorrow, before Dean shrugged and brushed it off.

"My dad taught me. There are other hunters out there."

Other hunters. The nameless shift itched at the back of Danny's mind, but he wouldn't ask any more.

The next day, Dean dropped Danny off home, helping him shuffle to the door and depositing him on the couch, making sure he was going to be okay. Danny assured him that he was - even he had friends - and Dean left him with a smile and a wave in deference to the stitching and the deep pain caused by his own harried field surgery.

"You take care of yourself Danny, okay?"

"Hey. You too, Dean."

Dean gave him a last smile, and then was gone.

The thing that had made the most impact on Danny's life since Mavis got back in its Chevy and drove out of his life.

At least physically. True to Dean's word, he had taken care of any infection or internal bleeding, and Danny's bizarre motel room surgery became just another scar. The wounds healed, but the experience was like a burr in his mind, something he couldn't let go. He had made the mistake of blithely ignoring the weirdness, the wrongness in his life and resolutely moved forward toward normalcy regardless once already. He couldn't bring himself to do it again. He couldn't help thinking about Dean, and all the bits and pieces of his strange life he had gleaned from their brief encounter, memorable though it had been.

He found himself searching for things left unsolved, like Mavis' murder had been, or things unexplained and unexplainable. He even tried to track Dean down a few months later, but unsurprisingly, the guy proved impossible to find, even for a once-idealistic journalism major. You'd have thought that monster Chevy was a dead giveaway, but Dean seemed as much a ghost as those he hunted. Then there was that word, _hunter. _Ambrose had said Dean was a hunter, like it was a job description, a title, what he was. He worried the thread until he got results, like the good journalist he could have been if Mavis had never been murdered. During the few years since, Danny had been a jack of all trades, with as many jobs as addresses, and in the months following Dean's departure, he had tried to go back to that normal life, such as it was. But in his own way, Dean had been a doorway - a doorway Danny couldn't just walk back through, even if he had really wanted to.

A few months later, looking into three mysteriously eviscerated hikers, he met a woman whose name was Olivia Lowry. And from then on, everything changed. It really changed with Dean as its catalyst, of course, but Olivia was open in ways Dean hadn't been, seeing Danny as a fledgling comrade rather than a job. He learned fast. Reality reordered around him, much as it had when he had been staring into the spectral face of the love of his life back from the dead, covered in blood as Dean Winchester dug the last remnants of a witch's magic bullet out of his ribs. There was no going back from that. Just as there was no going back after Olivia introduced him to a ten-year-old boy possessed by a demon, which she promptly exorcised. Or when she had been almost drowned by a water wraith, and it had been Danny who had waded out, chanting the words in Hopi and grasping a fistful of earth to keep the water spirit at bay.

He couldn't turn away, not again. It wasn't just a vague worry, a gut feeling, this time. This time it was real, and he knew it. There was no turning back.

Eventually, when Danny was capable enough to handle himself, he and Olivia had parted, each seeking their own hunts. He met others, learned their stories that seemed eerily similar to his own. The supernatural had come knocking, and some people couldn't know what was out there, and still go to work in a high-rise every day.

He had picked up on the string of teenage deaths, all connected to an old boarding house condemned for demolition in a few weeks time. A little more digging and he had learned of the murder of one of the tenants by another during the depression when the place was still operational. He'd looked into less.

Though Dean Winchester had never been far from his thoughts, being a symbol of every crazy circumstance that had led him into a hunter's life, he had pretty much given up on ever seeing the guy again … until there was a shotgun in his face, and Dean Winchester's familiar green eyes behind it.


	6. Chapter 6 : Old acquaintance be forgot

_Jackson, Iowa, present day._

Dean's eyebrows shot up.

"_Danny?"_

The smile that flickered out at him from the glow of Sam's flashlight was wiser than it had been.

"You remember me?"

Dean's mouth was literally hanging open.

"What - how -"

"Hey, you can't just dump the supernatural world on a guy, perform surgery and leave, and expect everything to just slide right back into normal."

"Surgery?" Came Sam's voice - half curious, half amused damn him - from behind Dean's shoulder. Danny squinted at Sam against the flashlight.

"Who you got with you? I thought you went it alone, Dean."

"No time for that now," Dean snapped before Sam could say another word.

"There's a -"

"Vengeful spirit, I know. I know all about that, remember?"

Dean could practically feel Sam's eyes boring into the back of his neck, and to be honest seeing Danny Ellis again, in this place and circumstance of all things, had knocked him a little off balance. Dean squared his shoulders.

"So, lets quit with the confab and -"

"Salt and burn. Right." Danny smiled. "Scream if you find anything, I'll meet you back in the foyer there. Hey, just don't disappear on me, okay?"

Danny hefted his shotgun and began moving past Dean.

"I got the south side."

Sam was staring in fascination at his brother. He knew very few things that could get Dean obviously flustered, but Danny Ellis appeared to be one.

The spirit in the boarding house had turned out to be exactly what Dean said it would be - a ridiculously simple salt-and-burn that made Sam question just what exactly hunters around Iowa were doing with their time. It was a testament to how obviously hit for six Dean was that he had even passed up crowing over Sam and his apparently unfounded anxieties about the job being too simple. It ended up being Danny who had located the spirit's remains - the guy's pack, which for some reason had stayed at the boarding house after his death and was literally every earthly possession the depression-era drifter had owned, thus tying him to the physical realm, awakened by the scheduled demolition of the old building. It was textbook. By the time Sam and Dean heard the rapport of Danny's shotgun, the hunter had already dispersed the spirit long enough to douse the pack, salt it and light it up, sending the spirit into the great beyond, and had nothing more to show for it than a split lip and a grin. The hunt was textbook simple - it turned out to be Danny who wasn't.

The name of Danny Ellis meant nothing to Sam. Dean had never mentioned him. The guy was little and lithe, maybe thirty to thirty-five years old, with a pale face, jagged black hair, and hard grey eyes. And he seemed to know Dean pretty well.

For some reason beyond him, Sam found Danny's effect on Dean both disturbing and amusing. He regarded Danny from where he sat across the table at the bar the three hunters had stopped at after serving the boarding house spirit his notice. He watched in amusement as Dean flushed and stuttered over his words, and Danny grinned mercilessly and drank Dean under the table. He'd get the truth eventually. He contented himself by watching with amusement as Dean swallowed convulsively and automatically checked his exits. Danny downed another shot and smiled.

"So, Dean. Long time no see. And you've teamed up, of all things."

He nodded toward Sam. When Dean made no move to accommodate, Sam extended a hand, playfully enjoying his brother's discomfort.

"Sam Winchester, younger brother."

What Sam didn't expect was the flash of something that crossed Danny's face as he shook Sam's hand, his eyes skittering over Dean, who was focused on the tabletop. It was almost pity. Definitely sympathy, maybe understanding, as though the words _Sam Winchester, younger brother _confirmed something Danny had suspected. Sam's curiosity only deepened.

"Nice to meet you," was all Danny said.

"So, you met Dean on a hunt?" Sam asked.

"In a manner of speaking," Danny replied evasively. "It was a few years ago."

Sam frowned. "How many years ago?"

Danny shrugged, throwing back more whiskey than a guy his size had any right to and remain upright.

"Two or three."

Two or three, Sam thought. _When I was at Stanford. The plot thickens._

"What, you guys team up on a job, then?" Sam pressed.

Danny almost smiled, but his expression was hardening. "I was the job."

Sam processed that as Dean and Danny drank in unison to fill the silence. So, it was looking like Danny wasn't even a hunter … before he met Dean. In a way, Sam was surprised it didn't happen more often, but was beginning to imagine how the idea that a regular guy had turned into a hunter because of him might appear to his brother.

Danny thunked his glass down on the table.

"Dean here helped me out. I'd be a dead man if he hadn't. But after that I just … things weren't the same, I guess. Maybe I just couldn't turn a blind eye anymore."

"So - what happened? After I left?" Dean spoke up, watching Danny from beneath his lashes, his face still tilted toward the tabletop.

"I tried to go back to the daily grind, such as it was after everything that had been happening those few years. My brand of normal, I suppose. But I couldn't get it out of my head, and it was like nothing else mattered. It wasn't just a vague feeling that kept me on the run this time. This time it was fact, and I could never gloss over the facts."

He cast Dean a smile that to Sam's surprise, his brother echoed, as though the joke was on both of them.

"Started looking into the fringe - you know, weird stories and unsolved cases. Couldn't let it go. Things didn't exactly work out how I planned last time I stuck my head in the sand. Well, the same sorts of things attract all hunters, it seems. I ran into one snooping around - Olivia Lowry."

"Lowry," Dean echoed, frowning. "Why does that name sound familiar?"

"Friend of Bobby's, I think," supplied Sam.

"Small world," Danny conceded darkly. "Anyway, I've been on the hunt since. Go back to Hartford sometimes, but mostly have been bouncing around waiting for the piano to drop."

"No one with you?" Dean asked unexpectedly.

Sam cast him a surprised glance, and doubled it for Danny when the smaller man gave Dean a knowingly sorrowful look.

"I meet up with others from time to time - like you two tonight. But otherwise, no, just me. I guess I got used to being alone, after, well everything that happened."

Danny drained another shot and sighed.

"So, you boys heading out?" he asked, lifting his tone.

"Yeah, job's done, we'll get back on the road," Dean answered.

"You still driving that monster Chevy?"

"Wouldn't drive anything less."

Danny snorted, but smiled.

"Must be harder your way. At least I still circle back to home, such as it is, from time to time."

"We got our own definition of home," Sam said with a smile.

Danny tilted his head and regarded Sam carefully, again as if seeing something in him he had already suspected. Sam had often wondered about his brother during the years he spent away at school. He had known that Dad and Dean had continued hunting until Dad had disappeared and Dean had come to find Sam at Stanford. Up until he met Danny, though, he had really only wondered about the jobs he did, not about Dean himself. Because Dean was always the capable hunter, self-sufficient and implacable … wasn't he?

The three of them parted after that, exchanging cell numbers this time. Danny was heading back to Hartford for a few weeks, some stuff in the "cover ass" department to deal with. He shook their hands, grey eyes flat.

"Take care of each other, boys," he said, and Sam frowned at his choice of words as Dean turned quickly and ducked into the Impala. Danny raised a hand in farewell as he disappeared behind the bar into the back lot, and Sam folded into the passenger seat as Dean gunned the engine.

Dean was quiet on the drive back to the motel, and Sam couldn't help stealing curious glances at him every few miles.

"So, you ever going to fill me in on that hunt?" Sam asked as he followed Dean into the room, his brother dragging off his coat and tossing it on the bed.

"Huh?"

"Danny Ellis, wasting our spirit for us, lots of mysterious back-story, any of this ringing any bells?"

Dean shrugged. "Not much to tell. Yeah, he was part of a job I worked a while back. You heard him yourself - couldn't stick his head back in the sand. End of story."

Sam sighed, sitting down on the end of the bed and looking up at Dean.

"There's more to it, Dean. Talk to me. Please."

He expected Dean to shrug him off, accuse him of chick-flick moments, make a joke, any of the usual crap. What he didn't expect was Dean rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, casting a look around the room before setting himself on the foot of the other bed, mirroring Sam.

"It was kind of a mixed bag, that job. Thought it was a vengeful spirit, and in a way I guess it was. But it was … it was jacked up, Sammy. Turned out, this girl had been murdered by her psycho ex-husband, who doubled as a witch. He'd cast a binding on her, even after death. As if that wasn't crazy enough, turned out a piece of the bullet was still stuck in the fiancé - Danny. The spirit had been dogging him for years, trying to tell him. She was stuck bound to Danny instead of the man-witch ex, and Danny, he had no idea. Poor bastard never even knew what was going on."

He fell silent, eyes on the floor.

"So, you - what? Dug out the fragment and salted and burned? What about the witch?"

"We paid him a visit, too. Destroyed the fetish that kept him below demon radar, and Hell's debt collector came knocking not long after that."

Sam swallowed hard. It was typical of Dean to tease Sam for his reluctance to kill humans, but he knew Dean felt the same way, despite the bravado. Or maybe because of it. Setting demons on a human witch, knowing full well they would kill him and claim his soul, must have been uncomfortably close to that line for Dean. His brother cast him a quick look and must have read Sam's mind through his face.

"I had to stop it, Sammy. People were dying in an echo of Mavis Wells' death everywhere Danny went. The hell-whore ex was too good at his job to find any loopholes in his spellwork. While he lived, the binding couldn't be broken. While Danny walked around with that bullet in his ribs, Mavis' spirit would dog him. I did what I had to do."

"Okay, so you and Dad - "

"Nah, Dad wasn't there, he was down south on his own gig."

"So you dealt with all this yourself?"

"It wasn't the first time I'd worked a job alone, Sam."

Sam nodded, heart heavy. No, Dad had ditched Dean to deal with everything on his own, including Sam's absence and no back-up. Then he'd run into a vengeful-spirit-cross-binding-spell-cross-witch-cross-civilian-in-the-crossfire and had to deal with being the thing to change another man's life the way the demon had changed Dad's - and theirs - with mom's death.

"So Danny," he headed off his own thoughts before he could pursue that line of thinking much farther into uncomfortable territory. "He was the link, the fragment in his ribs?"

Dean nodded. "Yeah, he started fading out a while after the witch bit it, and it just hit me. The spirit turned up right about then and would have finished Danny off too, but maybe the guy had some luck at least."

Yeah, the kind of luck that saw the twisted spirit of your lover come back to kill you, Sam thought.

Before Sam could open his mouth, however, Dean pulled in a sigh and rubbed a hand across the back of his neck again.

"I just don't get it. I mean hell, if anyone had a reason to want nothing to do with the supernatural again, it was Danny. Witch murdered his girlfriend right in front of him, nearly finished him off with the same shot, then bound her restless spirit to turn his life to shit. Then I turn up, set demons on the ex, summon Mavis' spirit right to him and waste her, too. I dug a fragment of spelled silver out of the guy's ribs with a damn pen knife in a motel room, dude. Why the hell would he choose this life?"

"Maybe he never had much of a choice at all," Sam muttered.

"What?" Dean demanded, exasperation creeping into his voice as he raked his fingers through his hair.

"Think about the hunters we know, Dean. Think about Dad, and Bobby, Caleb and Pastor Jim, and even Gordon Walker. They were regular guys once, too, before the supernatural just jumped up and bit them. Did Danny have any more of a choice than Dad did? Than we did? You heard him, Dean. He knew what was out there, and he couldn't just turn away. It wasn't something he chose, it was something that happened _to _him."

Dean was silent a moment, elbows braced on knees, head low.

"You mean _I _happened to him. I was the thing that sent him into this life, Sam."

Sam pulled in a breath, pushing down irritation at Dean's ridiculous sense of personal responsibility.

"A witch is what happened to him, Dean. A botched spell, bad luck and a restless spirit is what happened. He said it himself - if you hadn't turned up, he'd be a dead man, sooner or later. So you may have helped drag his head out of the sand, but you saved his life, man. And hey, it's because of _Danny _that no more teenagers will end up dead in an abandoned boarding house thanks to a drifter's ghost. He finished this job, not us. If you did this job three years ago, and Danny started out hunting only months after you left - there's no saying how many people are alive because Danny Ellis became a hunter. He was set on this path long before you even rolled into Hartford."

Dean suddenly looked askance at Sam and gave him a crooked half-grin.

"Damn, Sammy, you'd have made one hell of a lawyer."

"Shut up," Sam replied, smiling back.

"You think he's going to be okay?" Dean asked after a moment, grin fading.

"He's a hunter," Sam replied. And that was all the certainty he could give.

The end.


End file.
